second mesa

And many happy returns. Hope you have a great day and a blessed year!

The Bishop and his wife gave Nick a really nice journal set for turning 12. Nick, the belligerent, almost teen that he is, didn’t seem too understand why a journal is so important. Either he was joking, or he really doesn’t understand the importance. You never can tell with pre-teens or full teens for that matter. Anyway, Becky gave a really good lesson on journal writing that night so our goal is to write at least once a week. So I’m going to try and do something here more often.

So, now to the real story. The kids, again, being the pre-teens that they are, have taken up the funny (depending on who you ask) task of changing the emphasis of words to make them sound different. Now don’t act like you never did this or something similar when you were younger. I remember Justin, Will, often one of the Williams, and I would go through the hymn book during Sacrament meeting adding “in the toilet” to every title. See what I mean by funny depending on who you ask? Anyway, we were reading the scriptures the other night, and Ashlee got stuck on “hitherto”. Nick, ever eager to assist, told her that it’s, “hit her toe.” In these situations where the decision is to either maintain seriousness or break out and laugh, I tend to go with laughing. Which is what I did this time. Laughing some more as I write this.

OK, over the Memorial Day weekend, a majority of you said to go ahead and do the name draw for Christmas this year. I’ll also email this list out to you all. (As a side note, after I left XETV I merged my work contacts with my Yahoo contacts and some of the preferred email addresses got jumbled up. Now I don’t know if which of the several email addresses I have from some of you are your preferred email – or even work anymore. If you get this email from a different email address than your preferred email, please let me know what your preferred email address is. Or if you don’t get the email, please let me know as well.)

So without further ado, here’s the list:
Jere has Trish
Becky has Josh
Melissa has Jere
Joe has Chris
Justin has Catherine
Laurie has Stephen
Will has Becky
Trish has Justin
Catherine has Leah
Chris has Amy
Leah has Matt
Josh has Joe
Andrea has Tianna
Stephen has Andrea
Amy has Will
Matt has Laurie
Tianna has Melissa

I made sure no one drew someone from the same household as last year, but if some of you switched and I need to make changes, please let me know.

Please remember the limit is $20. Happy shopping – only 201 days until Christmas!

Actually, I was just thinking about doing the drawing of Christmas gift exchange names for this year. Does anyone think it’s still too early for that? Let me know if you do – and if you still haven’t sent your Christmas gift to whomever you had this past Christmas, I hope you’ve already apologized/explained why no gift/justified. I’m sure it’s OK and I’m sure you’re forgiven. I know this Christmas was a pretty tight one for a lot of us.

On an unrelated note, I’m afraid Joe is going to win our little contest of which of us will find new employment first. It seems his job skills are in much more demand than those of a good manager. Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers! We’ll let you know as soon as anything changes here in San Diego.